SAMD Archive

Central Europe is a region with one of the most comprehensive networks for cloud and precipitation observations worldwide. To unify these observations to become "easy-to-use" data - establish the infrastructure to store them and make them accessible to the climate community - is the goal of SAMD – the Standardized Atmospheric Measurement Data Archive. SAMD is the core activity of the Observation Module in HD(CP)².

New Research Data Culture

The SAMD data archive for observation data was built up in the first project phase, to be a role model for a new culture of storing, sharing, and using observation data in atmospheric sciences. The archive collects data of various observing systems in a standardized netCDF format. The SAMD Observation Product Standard (SOPS) ensures common naming conventions, which are very close to the CF conventions. SOPS standardizes a wide range of different instruments, including remote sensing-, in-situ-, and satellite observations, meteorological standard instruments as well as recent scientific trends. It also provides its own meta data standard.The standardization of observation data towards more transparency and easier usage for a wider range of researchers is an important and topical issue in the research community. Further examples are ACTRIS, CLOUDNET, and activities in the satellite community.

The SAMD archive is registered at re3data (REgistry of REsearch data REpositories) with the DOI: doi.org/10.17616/R3D944.

Data Storage

The technical framework was established in the first funding phase of HD(CP)² and is now fully utilized. The data are hosted on distributed THREDDS servers (Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services), which allow easy data access via HTTP and OPeNDAP. The framework is expandable regarding processors, memory and storage to keep pace with the increase of the data.

Data Access

The data can be accessed via a common web portal hosted by ICDC Hamburg as the global entry point.

The web portal provides a short description for each data set, based on its meta data, links to the respective data server for a manual download of single files, and prepared wget-scripts for the download of whole data sets.

We are working on a new shopping cart function for the web portal to comfort the search for data ranges like region, time intervals, and instruments. All data are freely available. Users just need a registration at one Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF)-Node, e.g. at DKRZ.